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Magnotta, 29, wanted in the Montreal killing of a Concordia University student from China, had already been in Berlin for days, it appears, while police continued to think he was still in Paris.

He’d been a fugitive since May 26, when he took a flight to Paris on Air Transat Flight 610. Seated next to the window in row 33, he alarmed other passengers with his strange behaviour. They alerted a flight attendant, and at one point Magnotta was found in the rear of the plane, crying.

On Monday, more than a week later, he walked into the unassuming Helin Internet Spatkauf in Berlin’s working-class immigrant district of Neukoelln and started to surf Internet sites about himself.

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Employee Kadir Anlayisli had also been looking at news reports about Magnotta, who police say killed Chinese student Jun Lin, 33, filmed the murder and then sent body parts through the mail.

“As he lifted his glasses, I thought right away, this is the guy they’re looking for . . . He had the kind of face you don’t forget,” said Anlayisli, 42, who described Magnotta’s gaze as “ice cold.”

Anlayisli directed him to a computer terminal, where he went online undisturbed for about an hour. Hesitant to phone the police for fear that he’d made a mistake, Anlayisli kept a close eye on the street with the intention of hailing a passing police car.

When he finally flagged down the van of young officers, “They looked at me like I was joking,” he said.

Magnotta, a self-professed bisexual porn actor and gay escort who many accuse of torturing and killing animals, at first denied being suspect, but then quietly surrendered. The arrest took only a few minutes.

It was a tranquil denouement to a crime so bizarre and wanton that it shocked people around the world.

From London, England, Prime Minister Stephen Harper congratulated police on the arrest. The government will request Magnotta’s extradition.

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He will face several charges, notably first-degree murder and indignity to a corpse.

His arrest “is really good news,” Lin’s former roommate said. “But now I want to know the reason why he did such things, because it all doesn’t make sense.”

“I will go see him in court when he comes to Canada,” another close friend said. “I want to look at him.

“I feel so hurt mentally,” he added. “It will be very hard to repair that.”

Montreal police Commander Ian Lafrenière thanked the public and Internet users who shared hundreds of images of Magnotta. He pointed out the irony of the situation: “We always said that he used the web to glorify himself,” Lafrenière said. “We believe it’s the web that brought him down also.”

Lin’s family in China, including a sister and his parents, who, according to Chinese media reports, divorced when Lin was a child, are still in the process of obtaining visas and airplane tickets to come to Canada, said Xu Zheng, consul at the Consulate General of China in Montreal.

Zheng said he hoped Canada would bring the suspect back as soon as possible “so that justice can be done and the victim can rest in peace.”

Magnotta’s flight from police began shortly after the killing took place, on the night of May 24 to May 25, according to police. Later that day, a video of the killing was posted to the Internet.

It shows the perpetrator repeatedly stabbing the victim with an ice pick, dismembering the body and committing what appear to be acts of cannibalism and sexual defiling of the body.

On May 26, Magnotta boarded the Air Transat plane to Paris, a police source confirmed. Surveillance photos from Montreal’s airport show him wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt.

A French blogger on the flight wrote a detailed account of sitting beside a man he’s now sure was Magnotta.

Magnotta, carrying a black satchel, was the last one to board the flight and took seat 33A, next to the window, said the blogger, who refused to give his real name. Magnotta stank of sweat, the blogger said.

Later on, “I found he was becoming more and more agitated,” the blogger wrote. He got up, and when he didn’t return for a half-hour, the blogger alerted a flight attendant. Magnotta was seen crying at the back of the plane, and the blogger assumed he was scared of flying.

Once in Paris, Magnotta’s comings and goings were pieced together by police.

He slept at a hotel in Bagnolet, in the northeast Paris region of Seine-Saint-Denis, near the international bus terminal, French media reported. Police found pornography magazines and air sickness bags from the flight.

Magnotta is also said to have stayed with a friend in the suburb of Clichy-la-Garenne before the friend knew police were searching for him.

By this time, the gruesome affair had exploded in Canada. On May 29, Lin’s headless torso was found in a suitcase in a garbage heap near Magnotta’s building. A decomposing foot showed up at the Conservative party headquarters in Ottawa. Other body parts are still missing.

Magnotta was quickly named as the suspect. Police entered his rundown studio apartment in Montreal and found a blood-stained mattress and blood in the fridge.

An international arrest warrant was issued May 31, the same day he left for Berlin on a Eurolines bus, information confirmed by video surveillance.

He bought a ticket under the name K. Trammel, France 2 TV reported. The name is possibly inspired by Catherine Tramell, the infamous ice pick killer from the film Basic Instinct.

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